Don't Bank on the Bomb

It was hard. Alicia was a friend. I had been working with her for over six years. Other personnel would come and go, but Alicia stayed. Even when Wachovia became Wells Fargo, Alicia stayed. She knew my name, and she always did her best to help. So when I walked in that day and said, “I would like to close my accounts,” she was stunned.

“Why?” she asked.

“I hate to do it, especially I hate to leave you, but your bank invests heavily in nuclear weapons. I just can’t keep my money in a bank that invests in nuclear weapons.” She remained stunned. I could tell she wanted to argue, but what could she say? She just quietly got me three cashier’s checks, and that is how I left Wells Fargo.

Wells Fargo seems to be surviving without me. I suspect their executives never heard about the idiot who closed his account because of nuclear weapons, but that’s only because I was one of very, very few customers who did it. In fact, I know of no one else who left Wells Fargo because of nuclear weapons.

And this is the problem. If thousands of Wells Fargo customers had done what I did, we all would have heard about it, and Wells Fargo might very well have divested from nuclear weapons.

So here’s whart you can do to help cure our planet of a potentially terminal dis-ease. You can go to this website:

There, you can go to “Who Invests”. Now scroll down to the bottom and select the country you live or bank in. On that page, you can see if your bank is one of the banks that invests in the companies that produce nuclear weapons.

If your bank is contributing to human extinction, you can go right in and tell them you are leaving because of nuclear weapons. You can take your money out and put it into a more responsible bank, hopefully a locally owned bank or credit union.

The bank you leave will not be happy about it, but we can’t always make our bank’s feelings our top priority. The top priority right now is getting rid of nuclear weapons, and if enough of us divest from banks that invest in the nuclear weapons industry, we can have an enormous impact. The top priority for banks is always money, so if we take some of that from them, they will look deep into their hearts to find out where they are going wrong.

Even banks can’t afford to alienate their customers. In fact, we can say for sure that if banks continue to invest in nuclear weapons, it will be because their customers don’t care enough about human survival to move their money. (I certainly hope you are not such a customer.)

Let’s make this a movement the banks can’t ignore. Send this request to everyone you know.